Stay hungry, stay foolish

Javascript

From past 5 years I have been working with lot of technical teams struggling to version APIs and create API documentation as per spec change. After boom of version control tools like Github & SVN teams are able to track source code but updating API specs for every minor change is still something that developers forget or don’t really care to update on time. It doesn’t matter much if nobody else is consuming their APIs but if APIs are exposed as REST- developer/app should know at same time that something was changed in API.

Teams are still able to track major API version releases but minor spec change in APIs are untracked most of the time, sometimes cause of communication gap and sometimes cause of improper documentation, leading to frustration within teams and products. As developers, how do we version our APIs without giving this responsibility to one more person who has to coordinate with each and every developer of team trying to figure out what was updated and manually updating documentation at end of the day?

Recently, I came across a tool that made my life as a product developer plain sailing. Now the developer who is working on server side API needs to add comments in his code in proper format and anyone from team will be able to generate API document out of it. Whenever server team works on any functionality they update comments in their own code giving it a minor release number if required and team will be able to generate documentation if they have access to latest updated server code without knowing server code language on my local. Take below example for instance

What is ECMAScript?

As per Wiki- ECMAScript(European Computer Manufacturers Association) is a trademarked [1]scripting languagespecification standardized by Ecma International in ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262. We use various implementations of ECMAScript for client side scripting on web. Examples are JavaScript, ActionScript and Jscript.

ECMAScript was developed by Brendan Eich- Father of JavaScript. It was named Mocha, then Livescript and finally JavaScript.

ECMAScript7: The rise of compilers

After ES6 (2015), there was huge rise in number of developers switching from traditional way of writing JavaScript to start using compiled code generators. Compiled code generators compiles code written in other languages to JavaScript. Our favourite JS code compiler is Babel(https://babeljs.io/) as it is actively supporting ES7 (ECMAScript 2016). For example Babel compiles following code:

Gulp and Grunt: Automate your workflows

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. – Bill Gates

With active usage of tools like Gulp and Grunt companies and developers started automating workflows for JavaScript applications. These tools helped developers in doing lot of automated tasks like library upgrade, automated testing, folder structure creation and so on. If you didn’t use Gulp and Grunt in your projects till now and make a New Year resolution to automate your build process and automate JavaScript tasks for an easier life.

The incredible Node.JS

Node.js foundation grew to more than 3 million users. Companies like Intel, IBM and Joyent used Node.js to create software architectures, real-time location tracking services and IoT. With npm lives of developers became lot easier as they could do a lot of heavy architecture creation using CLI. Also I heard companies switching from traditional Java/PHP technology stack to next gen Node.js for their active products.

How rise of ECMAScript revolutionized cross-platform apps

This year we saw a lot of people moving from native to cross-platform and vice versa. Keeping same codebase across all platforms helped companies and developers to launch their products in really less time when compared to writing code in different languages for each platform. With tools like npm creating a Cordova application became one liner.

I will be skipping traditional TO DO app tutorial here, as you can find it anywhere on web. Rather, I will try to explain few scenarios that developers come across while developing apps using JavaScript frameworks in real-time.

In this tutorial we will be covering

Setting up development environment for Meteor?

How to integrate your Meteor application with Mongo DB?

How to secure your Meteor application?

Setting up development environment for Meteor
Most popular IDEs like Sublime, Webstorm and on-cloud IDE- Cloud 9 integrates seamlessly with Meteor. I am a fan of Sublime so I will explain how to set up autocomplete engine into Sublime Text 3. You can visit Meteor website and setup your own IDE.
Open Sublime Text-

From menu bar select preferences-> Settings -Users

If you have not made any changes from time you installed Sublime replace contents of file with following code-

Now press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P and type Install. You will see ‘Package Control: Install Package’ in menu. Select it and press Enter. Now search for TernJS and click on it. Package will install automatically. Restart Sublime and you will see your Sublime just got smarter and it can autocomplete Meteor code for you.

How to integrate your Meteor application with Mongo DB?
We already have Meteor code running on local server. Now let’s add DB support. Meteor comes bundled with MongoDB so you don’t need to include it again, still if you wish you can do custom setup but let’s not discuss it in this tutorial as pre bundle itself is self-sufficient to create end-end application.

Lets create Fishes collection.

Fishes = new Mongo.Collection("fishes");

It creates a MongoDB collection called Fishes and creates a cache connected to server.

and you will see both client and server have a new beautiful red fighter fish. If you noticed, you were able to alter DB using Javascript without authenticating with server which is a security breach. This is beacause Meteor has insecure package selected by default.

To remove insecure package navigate to your project folder in Command Line /Terminal and run-

meteor remove insecure

Now enable the accounts system and UI using following command from root directory of project-

meteor add accounts-ui accounts-password

I find package control really useful. They make your life lot easier by taking care of entire setup for useful technical modules, as in this example entire user management. Few years back implementing secured login module was estimated around 100 hours which came down to 1 minute with recent advancement in web technologies.

Now add login buttons to your app. Paste following blaze template anywhere in code. I will paste it in header.

Server Side Javascript has come long way, and after launch of Node.js in July 2011 gained lot of popularity as idea of using same language on client and server bought in code and software architecture uniformity in software applications. Even though Brendan Neich‘s Netscape already had vision to use same programming language on client and server but at that time people were using Pentium I/II processors which were not powerful enough to support Javascript Interpreters. In case you don’t know Brendan Neich he’s creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. In present generation of more than 2 billion smartphones you can get Phone with 1.2 GHz processor for less than $40. Seeing boom in processing speed of devices software developers started integrating Javascript interpreters like SpiderMonkey & Rhino in their applications. Some started using Jaxter server that embeds entire Mozilla Firefox Browser Engine in web server giving access to Ajax and Javascript within application.

Now when we have brief history of Javascript let me explain how to setup Meteor and create a simple server side Javascript application.

Now you can use your favourite code editor to change HTML and CSS and see if changes are getting reflected in your application without refreshing browser. If you can see updated HTML in your browser, congrats you deployed your first Javacsript Server Side Application. It’s called hot code push.